Stephen Phelps
Four seagulls turned with the wind above the construction lot – a hundred yards inland, the way they do when a storm is coming. But no storm was coming. Sunny morning – me sitting on the stoop of the trailer with a shotgun, Felicity inside cooking something that smelled like burnt electric wires. I spotted each gull in the sight. But no one eats seagull, not even a dog.
Baby, it’s ready. Felicity. Inside.
When a woman cooks a meal that smells like burnt electric wires, best to stay outside.
Baby, it’s—
Blackbird. On the roof of the backhoe. Dropping down to the sandy dirt. Looking for what? No food here.
But I was on my feet, charging like a goddamned soldier after the goddamned bird. Squeezing off one shot. Two. Three – and a spray of black feathers.
It wanted to fly. But with one wing gone? It spun into the air and crashed on the ground. I got to it, picked it up. It weighed almost nothing. Pecked my palm. I broke its neck.
Its little breastbone and ribcage – like a box. What little gifts, what diamond rings and ancient coins wouldn’t fit in such a box? A knife slice, and three Paxil tablets from Kathryn’s medicine cabinet melted into the blood and organs. Bitter meat but meat nonetheless.
Poor blackbird. Shot and then poisoned. Never fly again – unless launched in the night over the fence behind Johnny Bellefleur’s yard.
What dog could refuse?
Not theirs.
A whine and a yip. Poor dog.
One down, two to go.
After the words and whispers, the shovel scraping the dirt, and more whispers – silence. Light off in the kitchen. Light off in the bedroom.
Over the fence I tumbled. Following the blackbird.
I sat in the yard, waited. I wanted them asleep – so deep that they would hear no sound as I approached their bed, so far away that their dreams would change the first touch of the screwdriver on their necks into a cold pendant necklace, a sexual fingernail.
Waited.
Midnight.
One o’clock.
Two o’clock.
Time to give her a cold pendant, him a fingernail.
I stood, stretched. Jogged in place. Breathed deep in, out, in. Started across the lawn – almost whistling I was so happy.
Stopped.
Like a hand held my shoulder. Like Dad slapped me.
No hand. No slap. But a pair of eyes by the fence gate. A man – skinny, dark – watching me. Nightmare eyes. Arresting eyes.
My imagination? My creeping cowardice?
I started across again.
The man said, ‘Get you home, boy.’
I knew the voice. Hated it. But in the night, screwdriver in my hand?
‘Get you gone,’ the man said.
I ran at him. Thinking about the soft spot under the breastbone.
Bastard stood where he was. The night was his own. The yard, his own. Me, his own.
I stopped. Eye to eye with Papa Crowe. I said, ‘I could kill you.’
He said, ‘But won’t.’ He unlatched the gate. ‘Go on! Get!’ Like I was a dog.
‘What are you going to do to them?’
‘I take care of it. This no place for you.’
‘I need to do this.’
‘It ain’t yours. It been mine since before you born.’ He stepped toward me. I could stab him or I could run. ‘Get on home,’ he said.
I went through the gate. I stood in the front yard. Waited.
Heard one gunshot. Two.
I grinned, laughed, whistled.
Was I sorry Papa Crowe did the job I’d come to do? A little. No shame in that.